The Undesirable Many

Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital

Rosemary Ndubuizu

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781469689685
  9781469689678
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469689692
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Amid a national housing affordability crisis with political and social implications, Washington, DC, is notorious for its rapidly rising income inequality, high rates of displacement, and some of the most expensive rents in the country. Housing policy expert Rosemary Ndubuizu uncovers more than 100 years of affordable housing politics in the nation’s capital to illustrate local and national trends in how various social, economic, and political forces have worked together to ensure the persistent vulnerability of low-wage Black families to housing insecurity and displacement.

Since the 1960s, Black women have been at the forefront of combating efforts to force Black people out of DC. The Undesirable Many recounts the history of Black women’s tenant activism and organized opposition through a Black feminist materialism framework that exposes present-day housing inequities as deeply entangled in the politics and practices of gender and racial inequity. Drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of in-depth interviews with Black women tenant activists and affordable housing advocates, Ndubuizu uncovers how gendered stereotypes of Black tenant irresponsibility have shaped market behavior and informed political justification for different consumer treatment. Politicians, landlords, and even nonprofit housing providers often championed disciplinary housing governance such as mandatory housekeeping classes, welfare garnishment, paternal property management, and case management, contending that the problem was not housing but the Black family itself. By exposing these strategies alongside low-income Black women’s political perspectives and experiences, The Undesirable Many offers valuable lessons for contemporary challenges in affordable housing advocacy and welfare politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Map
• Introduction: Who Belongs in the City?
• 1. Finding “Problem Families”: The Origins of Disciplinary Housing Governance
• 2. Silent No Longer: Black Mothers, Tenant Revolt, and Evolving Opposition
• 3. Black (Class) Chasms: DC’s Rent Control Debates, Underclass Discourse, and the Marginalization of Black Women in the 1970s and 1980s
• 4. I Want to Own the Plantations: Tenant Management, Conservative Populism, and Austerity Politics in the 1980s
• 5. Like Middle-Class People without Money: Urban Growth Politics and the Return of the “Honorable Poor” at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
• Conclusion: Like We Don’t Belong
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index